determining the responsibility of the Prince-President and his Ministers was brought forward. It provided for the punishment and trial of Ministers and of the Prince-President in the event of their violating the Constitution, and it was the last measure of importance which the Chamber was permitted to consider. On the night of the 1st of December the Prince-President and his coadjutors secretly printed a number of decrees, which were posted before daybreak on the walls of Paris. These announced the dissolution of the National Assembly and of the Council of State; the abrogation of the law of May 31st, 1850; the convocation of the French electoral colleges from the 14th to the 21st of December; and the proclamation of a state of siege in Paris. The Prince-President further submitted to the electors a new programme, of which the chief points were (1), a responsible chief named for ten years; (2), Ministers dependent on the Executive alone; (3), a Council of State; (4), a Legislature elected by universal suffrage without scrutin de liste, and (5), a Second Assembly, or Senate, filled with all the illustrious persons of the nation. In a word, he proposed to revive the system under which the First Consul transformed France into a military Empire. Proclamations appealing to the army

were also issued. As for the Chamber, its members were arrested when they attempted to offer a protest. All prominent men who might have organised opposition among the masses were suddenly captured and thrown into prison. At the first show of popular resistance, the troops, who had been plied with strong drink for the occasion, fired on the people—in fact, the army seized France, and, having gagged and bound her, laid her at the feet of the Bonapartists. When Mr. Senior asked M. de Tocqueville if he did not think that the contest had been virtually forced on by the Assembly, we have said that the French statesman denied the charge. M. de Tocqueville contended that the proposition to put the army under the orders of the President of the Chamber was absurd, because it was impracticable, and need not have alarmed the Prince-President. The army had been so corrupted that it would not have obeyed the orders of the Chamber. As for the law of responsibility, that was not meant as a step in a conspiracy to crush the Prince-President. This law, M. de Tocqueville assured Mr. Senior, was sent up to the Chamber by the Council of State, who had been two years at work on it, and the Committee of the Chamber, fearing lest it might provoke a collision with the President, actually refused to declare it urgent. “Though I have said,” observed De Tocqueville, “that he (the Prince-President) has been conspiring since his election, I do not believe that he intended to strike so soon. His plan was to wait till next March, when the fears of May, 1852, would be most intense. Two circumstances forced him on more rapidly. One was the candidature of the Prince de Joinville. He thought him the only dangerous competitor. The other was an agitation set on foot by the Legitimists in the Conseils Généraux for the repeal of the law of May 31st. That law was his moral weapon against the Assembly, and he feared that if he delayed, it might be repealed without him.”[48] The brutality displayed by the police who dispersed the Legislative Assembly, and by the soldiery who fired in the most wanton manner on the 3rd of December, without any justification whatever, on the houses, and on peaceful passers-by along the boulevards of Paris, was stigmatised by the public opinion of England as barbarous and outrageous. It set the educated classes in France without distinction of party against the Prince-President to such an extent, that it became a mark of social and intellectual distinction to refuse to recognise or serve under the new régime. In the provinces the Prince-President’s tactics of repression were equally successful, and some 10,000 persons were seized and transported to penal settlements, without being convicted by any form of legal trial. The papers of the distinguished statesmen and generals who were alleged to have been conspiring against the Prince-President were ransacked; but no trace of evidence was found against them, and they were accordingly never brought to trial at all. Having thus destroyed the Constitution by the sword, Prince Charles Louis Bonaparte appealed for a vote of indemnity to a nation which had no alternative but to choose between him and anarchy. The result of this appeal was a vote of 7,439,000 votes in his favour, and 640,737 against him—M. de Montalembert, to the grief and surprise of the educated classes, being among those who joined the majority.

What was the attitude of the Queen to these events? On the 5th of December, Lord Palmerston sent a despatch to Lord Normanby, the British Ambassador at Paris, stating that “it is her Majesty’s desire that nothing should be done by her Ambassador at Paris which could wear the appearance of an interference of any kind in the internal affairs of France.” Lord Normanby accordingly called on M. Turgot, Minister of Foreign Affairs, to communicate this instruction, and apologised for his delay in making the communication. M. Turgot sarcastically replied that the delay was not of importance, as he had two days before that heard from M. de Walewski, the French Envoy in London, that Lord Palmerston had approved of the deeds of the Prince-President. When the despatch from Lord Normanby recording this interview reached the Queen, she sent it to Lord John Russell, pointing out that Lord Palmerston’s approval of the coup d’état was not only a defiance of her own personal wishes, but also of a resolution of the Cabinet. Lord John Russell complained to Lord Palmerston about the matter, but instead of expressing regret, the latter sent to Lord Normanby a despatch strongly approving of the coup d’état, which, however, he concealed from the Prime Minister and the Queen. It was not till the 18th of December that Lord John Russell was able to inform the Queen that he had at last received from Lord Palmerston an explanation, which was so unsatisfactory that he had been compelled to write to that turbulent Minister “in the most decisive terms.” In plain English, Lord John called on Palmerston to resign. He sent in his resignation promptly enough, excusing himself by saying that his approval of the coup d’état was but the expression of a personal and not of an official opinion. The whole correspondence was submitted to the Queen, who accepted the resignation of the Foreign Secretary with alacrity. “It was quite clear to the Queen,” writes Prince Albert in a letter to the Prime Minister, “that we were entering on most dangerous times, in which Military Despotism and Red Republicanism will for some time be the only powers on the Continent, to both of which the Constitutional Monarchy of England will be equally hateful.” The calmative influence of England, her Majesty thought, should be used to assuage and not embitter the conflicts abroad which produce such a perilous state of things. But this influence, she held, had “been rendered null by Lord Palmerston’s personal manner of conducting the foreign affairs, and the universal hatred which he has succeeded in inspiring on the Continent.”

On the 22nd of December a Cabinet Meeting unanimously condemned Palmerston’s conduct, and the post vacated by him was accepted by Lord Granville, who was installed at the Foreign Office on the 27th of December. Lord Palmerston’s friends forthwith began to fill the Press with foolish reports, that he had been dismissed because foreign Courts had influenced the Queen against him. These insinuations were utterly unjust. For when Baron Brunnow asked Lord John Russell to contradict these rumours, the Queen wrote to Lord John as follows:—“Baron Brunnow’s letter is in fact very presuming, as it insinuates the possibility of changes of government in this country taking place at the instigation of Foreign Ministers, and the Queen is glad that Lord John gave him a dignified answer.” Palmerston’s dismissal, in truth, was due to his incurable recklessness, and his inveterate habit of not only compromising both the Queen and the Cabinet without consulting them, but of acting contrary to the course which had been definitely adopted by Queen and Cabinet alike, in grave and delicate affairs. Louis Napoleon was the only personage of distinction who regretted his fall. “So long as he was in office,” remarked the Prince-President cynically, “England would have no allies.”

CHAPTER XXVII.

A YEAR OF EXCITEMENT AND PANIC.

Parliament met on the 3rd of February, and members, of course, could talk of nothing save the rupture between Lord Palmerston and the Ministry. The Queen’s Speech suggested, as topics of legislation, certain Reports of Commissions on the practice and proceedings in the Supreme Court of Law and

Equity, the reorganisation of the Government of New Zealand, and Parliamentary Reform. Why, asked the Tories, was there no allusion to agricultural distress? Was it not absurd to congratulate the country on the fact that remission of import duties had not diminished revenue, when revenue was only maintained by the unpopular and iniquitous Income Tax? Why was no notice taken of the open and ostentatious defiance by the Roman Catholics of the Act against Papal Aggression? For the tranquillity of Ireland the Government surely ought not to take credit, inasmuch as it was due to the exodus of the Irish people to America. As for Parliamentary Reform, Lord Derby declared contemptuously that there were not 500 reasonable men in the country who wanted a new Reform Bill. These criticisms, however, fell flat. The one question of the hour was, Why had the Foreign Secretary resigned? and explanations were given by Lord John Russell and Lord Palmerston. “In all my experience,” says Mr. Greville, writing of this incident, “I never recollect such a triumph as Lord John Russell achieved, and such complete discomfiture as Palmerston’s.... Palmerston was weak and inefficient, and it is pretty certain he was taken by surprise, and was unprepared for all that John Russell brought forward. Not a man of weight or influence said a word for him, nobody but Milnes [afterwards Lord Houghton] and [Lord] Dudley Stuart. The Queen’s letter was decisive, for it was evident his conduct must have been intolerable to elicit such charges and rebukes; and it cannot fail to strike everybody that no man of common spirit, and who felt a consciousness of innocence, would have brooked anything so insulting.”[49]

But Palmerston, though a fallen Minister, was not the man to sit meekly under such a mortification. As he said himself, he would soon give Lord John Russell “tit for tat.” His chance for retaliation came when the arbitrary acts of the Prince-President of the French Republic roused the fighting instincts of the English people. A wave of panic ran over the country, and it was asserted that as Charles Louis Bonaparte had founded his power by the sword, so by free use of the sword must he keep it. M. Berryer had expressed in the Chamber the taunt which was freely whispered through France, that the Prince-President’s aim was to establish an “Empire without genius and without military glory.” Surely, then, Englishmen argued, France under this unscrupulous usurper must be forced into war, in order to divert her attention from the bondage in which she is held by her Autocrat and his army. But if France must needs make war so that the French people may get military glory in compensation for civil liberty, a war on England, whose Press teemed with insulting criticisms on the brutality of the coup d’état, was of all wars the one most likely to be popular with the French soldiery. From such reasoning it was but a corollary that England was, as usual, utterly unprepared for attack, and a panic-cry was accordingly revived in favour of strengthening her defensive forces. Yielding to this cry, Lord John Russell introduced his celebrated Militia Bill, which organised a local as distinguished from a general militia—that is to say, a force whose regiments could be called on for service, not in any part of the United Kingdom, but only in their own counties. This was the weak point of the scheme, and the Duke of Wellington did not conceal his bad opinion of it. Fortified by the Duke’s moral support, Lord Palmerston assailed the Militia Bill of the Government with relentless ferocity. On the 20th of February he carried against the Government, by a majority of nine, an amendment in favour of organising a general instead of a local militia, and Lord John Russell resigned on the 23rd of February. Thus fell the last Whig Cabinet that has ruled England—all succeeding Liberal Ministries being either coalitions of Whigs, Peelites, and Radicals, or of Whigs and Radicals alone.

For reasons which have been already given, the times were not propitious for a coalition of this sort. The Queen had therefore no option but to send for Lord Derby, and ask him to form a Protectionist Ministry. She was, of course, deeply sensible of the fact that by recent declarations in favour of Protection, no Ministry of which he was the head could command the confidence of the nation. Indeed, Lord Derby himself was aware of this. But as his followers had joined Lord Palmerston in ejecting the Whigs, he felt that he could not in honour shrink from the embarrassing task of forming a Cabinet to govern the country, with a certain majority against him in the House of Commons, and a dubious majority at his back in the House of Lords. A futile attempt was made to induce Lord Palmerston to join the Tory Cabinet—the Queen agreeing to accept him as a Minister, provided he did not go to the Foreign Office, and was not entrusted with the leadership of the House of Commons. Palmerston refused all Lord Derby’s overtures, because he did not care to cast in his lot with a Party which was committed to Protection. One Tory leader, however, shared none of Lord Derby’s fears for the future. Writing in his Diary on the 20th of February, Lord Malmesbury says:—“Went to Disraeli’s after breakfast, and found him in a state of delight at the idea of coming into office. He said he ‘felt just like a young girl going to her first ball,’ constantly repeating, ‘now we have got a status.’”

The chief appointments in the new Cabinet were as follows:—The Earl of Derby, Prime Minister; Lord St. Leonards, Lord Chancellor; Mr. Disraeli, Chancellor of the Exchequer, as to which the joke current in Society at the time was “that Benjamin’s mess will be five times as great as the others;”[50] the Earl of Malmesbury, Foreign Secretary; Sir John Pakington, Colonial Secretary; Mr. Spencer Walpole, Home Secretary; Mr. Herries, President of the Board of Control;[51] Earl of Lonsdale, Lord Privy Seal. The only members of the Cabinet who had ever held office before were Lord Derby and Lord Lonsdale, and the country was anxious as to the competence of a Cabinet of novices to carry on the Government of the Queen. “The new Government,” writes Mr. Greville, “is treated with great contempt, and many of the appointments are pitiable.” Sir George Cornewall Lewis, in a letter to Sir Edmund Head, remarks that “the chief effect of the change has been that Graham and Cardwell have come to sit among the Whigs, while Gladstone and Sidney Herbert sit below the gangway.”[52] As for Lord Palmerston—though he got Lady Palmerston to invite Lord John Russell to one of her parties, and otherwise showed in public some desire to be reconciled to him—he told Lord Clarendon privately that “John Russell had given him his independence, and he meant to avail himself of that advantage.”[53] Moreover, to add to Lord Derby’s perplexities, there soon arose great complaints against Mr. Disraeli as Leader of the House of Commons. “They say,” writes Mr. Greville, “that he does not play his part as Leader with tact and propriety, and treats his opponents impudently and uncourteously.”

The new Government promised the Queen that they would wind up the affairs of the Session as quickly as possible, and as a dissolution was objectionable at that critical moment, they assured her that they would bring forward no contentious business. They introduced a Militia Bill, designed to meet the objections of Lord Palmerston to the measure of Lord John Russell. Though Mr. Walpole, the Minister in charge of the Bill, covered the Cabinet with ridicule by proposing that every militiaman who served two years should get a vote for the county in which he was enrolled, public contempt was diverted from the Ministry to the Opposition. By an inconceivable blunder, Lord John Russell, without consulting with his colleagues, came down to the House of Commons and opposed the second reading of a Bill, to the principle of which he knew the majority were already committed by the vote that had expelled him from office. He thus gave Lord Palmerston an opportunity of making a bitter attack on him. He also led his Party to a defeat as sure as it was disastrous. He discovered dissensions and divisions of opinion among his followers, the exposure of which not only demoralised them, but weakened public confidence in them as a competent governing organisation. This blunder settled the destiny of Lord John Russell. All sections of the Opposition now joined Mr. Bright in saying that Lord John must never again be permitted to lead the Liberal Party. The incident, unimportant as it seems, was of high historic significance. It rendered the Coalition Ministry under Lord Aberdeen inevitable. It rendered Whig Cabinets henceforth impossible in England.

Mr. Disraeli’s Budget speech was a brilliant performance which pleased everybody but his own Party. Its principal point was to provide for the continuance of the Income Tax for one year. But what made it interesting was its glowing eulogy of the Free Trade measures of Sir Robert Peel, not to mention the elaborate statistics by which Mr. Disraeli, while silent on the Corn Duties, proved that incomparable benefits had been conferred on the country by Peel’s tariffs, and by his reductions of import duties. The oration was, of course, a bid for the accession of Palmerston and the Peelites to the Tory Party. “Disraeli’s speech on introducing his Budget,” writes Lord Malmesbury, “has produced a bad effect in the country, for the farmers, though reconciled to giving up Protection, expected relief in other ways, and he does not give a hint at any measure for their advantage.”[54] A night or two afterwards, Mr. Disraeli had therefore to make a vague recantation of his change of opinions, and at a Mansion House dinner Lord Derby did his best to explain away the Budget speech of his embarrassing colleague, by an elaborate exposition of the doctrine of compromise, on which he said British institutions were founded.

During the first part of the Parliamentary Session of 1852 the cause of Parliamentary Reform made but little progress. Mr. Hume, on the 25th of March, moved for leave to bring in a Bill for the extension of the Franchise. Though he tried to galvanise his party into vigorous life by a scornful and defiant retort to Lord Derby’s recent attack on democracy,[55] the discussion of the subject was felt to be academic rather than practical, and his motion was rejected by a vote of 244 to 39. A similar fate attended Mr. Locke King when he, too, brought in his motion to assimilate the County and Borough Franchise. Several debates were devoted to the question of the prevalence of bribery at elections, and Lord John Russell’s Bill, empowering the Crown to direct a Commission of Inquiry into any place at which an Election Committee reported the existence of bribery, was carried through both Houses of Parliament. The disfranchisement of Sudbury and St. Albans for corrupt practices had left four seats in the House of Commons to dispose of. Mr. Disraeli’s scheme for allocating them to the West Riding of Yorkshire and the Southern Division of Lancashire was, however, rejected on Mr. Gladstone’s amendment—a defeat which was a sharp reminder to the Ministry that, so long as they were in a minority and refused to dissolve Parliament, they could not hope to control the House of Commons when contentious business came before it.

An attack on the endowment of Maynooth College by Mr. Spooner, who demanded an inquiry into the system of education pursued at that seminary, wasted much time. Both parties, with a General Election impending, shrank from offending the Roman Catholic voters too deeply. Yet they were equally afraid of displeasing the aggressive Protestantism of the country. After repeated adjournments the matter dropped, chiefly owing to a significant threat from Mr. Gladstone and Lord John Russell, that to attack Maynooth was to reopen the whole question of the distribution of ecclesiastical endowments in Ireland, a question the discussion of which could not be advantageous to the Anglican minority in that kingdom. A barren debate on the remission of the Hop Duty, and Mr. Milner Gibson’s failure to carry resolutions condemning the Paper Duty, the Duty on advertisements, and the Stamp Duty on newspapers, together with Mr. Disraeli’s success in carrying his provisional Budget, continuing the Income Tax for one year, sum up the financial business of the Session. By the end of June all the measures which the Government had proposed to pass were disposed of.

Lord Derby’s first Government may have consisted of novices, but it evidently did excellent practical work as a Cabinet of affairs. For between its accession to office and the dissolution of Parliament it passed the Militia Act, the New Zealand Constitution Act, several good Law Reforms, including an Act to simplify special pleading and to amend procedure in the Common Law Courts, an Act extending the jurisdiction of County Courts, and another to abolish the office of the Masters in the Court of Chancery. Besides these, they passed useful Acts for improving the water supply of London, and restricting intramural interments.

Parliament was prorogued by the Queen in person on the 1st of July, one of the most interesting passages in her speech referring to the origin of the second Burmese war, and the capture of Rangoon and Martaban—events the record of which need not detain us long.

The second Burmese war ostensibly arose out of a complaint made to the Indian Government by a Mr. Sheppard, master of a Madras trading vessel.[56] He alleged that he had been imprisoned and fined by the Governor of Rangoon on the false charge of having thrown a man overboard. This was followed by other complaints from British subjects, who had been ill-used by the Burmese authorities, and the Rangoon merchants declared that, unless they were protected against the lawless exactions of the Governor’s subordinates and dependants—who had been told by him to get money as best they could, seeing he had none with which to pay their salaries—they must abandon all efforts to trade in the country. The Governor-General of India came to the conclusion that these complaints were justifiable, and easily proved that the Treaty of Yandaboo, made at the end of the first Burmese war, had been violated. Commodore Lambert was accordingly sent in H.M.S. Fox and two steamers to Rangoon, with a courteous message seeking reparation from the King of Ava, on account of the conduct of the Governor of Rangoon. The request was refused, and it was followed by a more peremptory demand. The Court of Ava replied in a conciliatory tone, recalled the Governor of Rangoon, and appointed a new one, who treated Commander Fishbourne, Lambert’s second in command, with some discourtesy. Commodore Lambert forthwith blockaded Rangoon, and seized a vessel belonging to the Burmese king.[57] On the 10th of January, four days after the blockade was established, the Fox was compelled to destroy a hostile stockade on the river. After some diplomatic fencing between the Indian Government and the King of Ava, an ultimatum was sent to his Majesty. He still refused to make any concessions, and war was declared.

General Goodwin, with a contingent from the Bengal Army, sailed from

India for the mouth of the Irawaddy on the 28th of March. He arrived there on the 2nd of April, and on the 5th stormed and captured Martaban, where the enemy, five thousand strong, fought behind a river line of defences extending over 800 yards. In the meantime, General Goodwin had been reinforced by a contingent from Madras, and Commodore Lambert had destroyed the stockades on the Rangoon river. It was then determined to attack Rangoon on the 9th of April. On the 11th, Rear-Admiral Austen cleared the way for the army by destroying the whole line of river defences on both banks. On the 12th three regiments of infantry and part of the artillery were landed, and the contest was, to the surprise of the General, commenced by the Burmese, who left their stockades and attacked the flanks of our advance. A strong stockade which stood in the way was carried, after severe losses. Major Fraser, Commanding Engineer, took the ladders to the fort, and mounting its defences alone, attracted by his gallantry the storming party round him which drove the enemy from the position. The troops were ordered to march on Rangoon, but by a different road from that on which the Burmese had made preparations to meet them. They carried by assault the Grand Pagoda, the fall of which citadel made us masters of the town. All the posts on the river fell into our hands in turn, and on the 27th of July Lord Dalhousie, the Governor-General of India, arrived at Rangoon, and congratulated the army on its victories. He then returned to Calcutta. On the 9th of October General Goodwin occupied Prome with a strong force, and in November an expedition was sent against Pegu, which was taken, after some sharp fighting, on the 20th of that month. After this victory Lord Dalhousie annexed the whole province to the British dominions; indeed, had it not been that he had an objection to expose British India to contact with the frontier of China, he would probably have annexed the whole of Burmah. Our small garrison at Pegu was then subjected to harassing attacks by the Burmese, and the war dragged slowly on. The Burmese always fled to the jungle whenever our men attacked them, returning to annoy our troops whenever they fell back on their quarters. Our capture of the chief centres of population and defence was not followed by the submission of the people. There were few roads in the country. General Goodwin had not adequate transport for his artillery. The climate had sadly weakened his forces, so that the unexpected prolongation of the war, however disappointing to the country, was inevitable.

After the prorogation of Parliament, on the 1st of July, it was dissolved on the 21st of August. On all important questions the Government during the Session had held uncertain and ambiguous language, appealing to the hopes of all parties alike. There was no strong feeling in the country on any subject save that of Free Trade, and it soon became apparent that the majority of the electors would not tolerate a return to Protection, or the imposition of a protective duty on corn. Still, the Protectionists were able to defeat some very able and distinguished men, notably Sir George Cornewall Lewis in Herefordshire, Sir George Grey in Northumberland, and Mr. Cardwell in Liverpool. In each case their successors were feeble mediocrities. Edinburgh, however, elected Macaulay without his even becoming a candidate. But though the Tories did not gain enough seats to enable them to abolish Free Trade, they had fully 300 staunch supporters who would vote like one man for their policy. The Opposition was more numerous, but it was split up into Whigs, Radicals, Peelites, and the Irish brigade, pledged not to give any vote that might tend to bring Lord John Russell back to office. The attitude of the Government was very equivocal during the contest. “They have,” writes Mr. Greville, “sacrificed every other object to that of catching votes; at one time, and at one place, representing themselves as Free Traders, in another as Protectionists, and everywhere pandering to the ignorance and bigotry of the masses by fanning the No Popery flame. Disraeli announced that he had no thoughts, and never had any, of attempting to restore Protection in the shape of import duties; but he made magnificent promises of the great things the Government meant to do for the farmers and the owners of land—by a scheme the nature and details of which he refused to reveal.” This scheme was to be one giving compensation by fiscal arrangements to the landed interest for the loss of the Corn Duties. Fear of an alliance between the Whigs, the Peelites, and the Manchester Radicals, on the basis of reduced expenditure and fresh Reform Bills, caused many Whigs to desert their Party. The Opposition was in a truly deplorable state. Their resentment against Lord John Russell, to whose mismanagement they attributed their electoral reverses, was deep and bitter. Malcontents openly advocated that the leadership should be transferred to Lord Lansdowne; and Lord Palmerston said that though he would be willing to join a Lansdowne Cabinet if formed, he would never serve under Lord John Russell, though he had no objection to serve with him. Lord Lansdowne’s hostility to Parliamentary Reform rendered him incapable of leading a Party that could not afford to dispense with Liberal votes. Moreover, he objected from chivalrous motives to take the leadership unless Lord John Russell asked him to do so. Lord John, on the other hand, told Sir J. Graham that he had made up his mind not to join any Government unless he was replaced in his post as Premier—an arrangement which would have simply perpetuated those divisions and dissensions in the Liberal Party that enabled the Tories to hold office. Lord Palmerston forecast the fate of the Government with wonderful shrewdness, when he said that the chances were they would fall on some mountebankish proposal for helping everybody out of the taxes, without adding to the burdens on the taxpayer.[58]

The Queen’s Speech, so to speak, showed the cloven hoof of the Protectionists. One paragraph filled the Free Traders with the darkest suspicions. It ran as follows:—“It gives me pleasure to be enabled, by the blessing of Providence, to congratulate you on the generally improved condition of the country, and especially of the industrious classes. If you should be of opinion that recent legislation, in contributing with other causes to this happy result, has at the same time inflicted unavoidable injury on certain important interests, I recommend you dispassionately to consider how far it may be practicable equitably to mitigate that injury, and to enable the industry of the country to meet successfully that unrestricted competition to which Parliament in its wisdom has decided that it should be subjected.” Writing to his wife on the day after the debate on the Address, Mr. Cobden alluded to this paragraph as “a queer, tricky allusion to the Free Trade question,” which “brought on a sharp attack upon the Government last night, and as all parties are agreed to force the Disraelites, I hope we shall bring matters to an end soon.”[59] The great aim of the Opposition, without distinction of faction, was to force the Government to say, frankly and fairly, whether they did or did not accept Free Trade in its entirety. But in the meantime an event occurred which for the moment stilled the clamour of contending parties, and united the whole nation in one great wail of mourning.

That event was the death of the Duke of Wellington at Walmer Castle on the 14th of September. This mournful calamity had been long expected. But when it happened the people seemed incapable of realising it. “It was,” said Prince Albert in a letter to Colonel Phipps, “as if in a tissue a particular thread which was worked into every pattern was suddenly withdrawn.” Moreover, it broke the last link that bound the nineteenth to the eighteenth century. “He was,” wrote the Queen to King Leopold, “the pride and good genius, as it were, of this country; the most loyal and devoted subject, and the staunchest supporter the Crown ever had. He was to us a true friend and most valuable adviser.... We shall soon stand sadly alone. Aberdeen is almost the only personal friend of the kind left to us—Melbourne, Peel, Liverpool, now the Duke—all gone.”[60]

The Queen would at once, and of her own motion, have ordered a public funeral, with the highest honours of State, for the remains of the illustrious dead, following the precedent set in the case of Nelson. She, however,

deemed that a solemn vote of Parliament would confer additional distinction on the ceremony. It was thus determined that the body of the Duke should lie in the custody of a Guard of Honour until both Houses of Parliament could meet in November and pass a resolution in favour of burying, in St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Victor of Waterloo by the side of the Victor of the Nile. The pages of Hansard are full of the glowing tributes to the memory of the great Duke, paid by the foremost orators of the Senate. Of these, one of the most brilliant came from Mr. Disraeli, and it subsequently gave rise to a good deal of scandal. A morning paper published a translation—said to come from the pen of the late Mr. Abraham Hayward, Q.C.—of the eulogium passed by M. Thiers in the French Chamber on the Emperor Napoleon I. This certainly bore such a suspiciously close resemblance to Mr. Disraeli’s oration, that the English orator was accused of plagiarism. But the highest tribute of homage to the Duke of Wellington came from the English people, to whom the Duke seemed to embody all the manly virtues of their race. To this fact Mr. Cobden himself bears striking, though grudging, testimony in a letter to his friend Mr. Thomasson, of Bolton, condemning the militant policy which led to an ever-increasing war expenditure. “Let as ask ourselves candidly,” he writes, “whether the country at large is in favour of any other policy than that which has been pursued by the aristocracy, Whig and Tory, for a century and a half? The man who impersonated that policy more than any other was the Duke of Wellington, and I had the daily opportunity of witnessing, at the Great Exhibition last year, that all other objects of interest sank to insignificance, even in that collection of a world’s wonders, when he made his entry into the Crystal Palace. The frenzy of admiration and enthusiasm which took possession of a hundred thousand people of all classes at the very announcement of his name, was one of the most impressive lessons I ever had of the real tendencies of the English character.”[61]

On the announcement of the Duke’s death every town in England displayed the customary emblems of mourning. When, on the 10th of November, the arrangements for the public funeral were well advanced, the corpse was removed, under military escort, from Walmer Castle to the great hall in Chelsea Hospital, where it was received by the Lord Chamberlain, and laid in state on a bier prepared for the purpose. On the 11th, the Queen, Prince Albert, and their family privately visited the Hospital, and paid their last respects to their dead friend. After they left, the Chelsea Pensioners, the Life Guards and Grenadiers, and the children of the Duke of York’s Schools were admitted. On the 12th, the nobility and gentry who held tickets of admission from the Lord Chamberlain came, and then there ensued a scene of deplorable confusion. Eighteen thousand persons passed before the bier between nine o’clock in the morning and five in the afternoon, and many thousands more, after waiting wearily outside in rain and gusty weather, turned away hopelessly when darkness set in.

When the public appeared next day (Saturday) claiming admission, the crowd before the Hospital gates in the morning simply overwhelmed the police. As it grew and gathered, the press became unbearable, and a surging mass of spectators fought and struggled with each other for their lives. Yells of agony rent the air; men and women were knocked down, or fell fainting for want of breath. Screaming children were held aloft in the air to escape suffocation by mothers, who themselves disappeared every minute in the struggle. A great cloud of steam exhaled from the heaving multitude, and far and near the approaches were impassable. After some time the police, reinforced by soldiery, gained control over the crowd, and some 50,000 persons then passed through the hall. On Monday better arrangements prevailed, and 50,000 persons passed the body with the greatest ease. On Tuesday 60,000, and on Wednesday 65,000 persons were admitted. On Saturday three persons, and on Tuesday two, perished in the crush.

On Wednesday a squadron of cavalry conveyed the corpse to the Horse Guards.

As it became clear that the day of the funeral (the 18th of November) would be kept as one of almost religious solemnity, and that no business would be done in London, the Bills of Exchange and Notes (Metropolis) Bill was passed quickly through Parliament. It enacted that bills falling due on the 18th of November should become payable and be presented on the 17th, but that, if paid before 2 p.m. on the 19th, they should not be subject to charges for notarial protest.

On the morning of the 18th of November the great funeral pageant, which Charles Dickens irreverently termed “a masquerade dipped in ink,” passed to St. Paul’s, through streets draped in black. Heavy rain and biting wind did not prevent spectators from perching themselves all through the preceding night on every spot where a glimpse of the procession could be obtained. Windows, roofs of houses, porticoes, balconies, every “coign of vantage” were covered with mourners. A million and a half of spectators gazed at the procession, and few ever forgot the strange and sudden silence into which the multitude was everywhere hushed, when the head of the column appeared, led by the dark, frowning masses of the Rifle Brigade, marching to the beat of muffled drum and the wail of the “Dead March” in Saul. Solemnly,

one of the most wondrous of military pageants filed past to the strains of mournful martial music. When the car with the remains of the Duke appeared, a thrill of sorrowful emotion surged through the crowd at each point of the route, as they saw “warriors carry the warrior’s pall.” Strange unutterable thoughts were aroused at the sight of the narrow and curiously emblazoned tenement which contained all that Time and Death had left of him who had overcome the master of modern Europe, but who, in turn, had himself fallen before a Conqueror unconquerable by the mightiest. To this exaltation of feeling succeeded an outburst of homely grief when the Duke’s favourite charger, led by his venerable groom, appeared following his master’s coffin. When the procession came to Temple Bar it was received by the Lord Mayor and Corporation, and at ten minutes to twelve it reached St. Paul’s.

The appearance of the cathedral will never be forgotten. Tiers of seats covered with black cloth rose on every side of the nave. The sombre draperies of the interior threw up the florid architecture of the great Protestant temple in relief of dazzling whiteness, and rows of gas jets round the cornices shed a soft, warm radiance on the scene. The service was choral. The Dean read the lesson, and when the “Nunc dimittis” was chanted, a dirge accompanied by trumpets followed, at the end of which the body was slowly lowered into the vault, the while the organ and wind instruments pealed forth the sad strains of the “Dead March.” As the coffin slowly vanished from view a wave of intensely sorrowful emotion passed over the vast assembly of mourners. Prince Albert visibly shook with grief. The veteran Marquis of Anglesey lost control of his feelings. Tears suddenly coursed down his furrowed cheeks, and, stepping forward, he placed his trembling hand on the vanishing coffin, as if to bid a last farewell to his old chief and companion in arms. The rest of the service proceeded in the usual manner, the conclusion of the ritual being Handel’s anthem—“His body is buried in peace.” Thereupon Garter King at Arms stepped forward and proclaimed the style and titles of the illustrious dead, and the Comptroller of the Household of the Duke advanced, broke his staff of office, and handed the pieces to Garter King at Arms, who laid them in the grave. The Bishop of London pronounced the benediction, and all was over.

The Queen and Prince Albert were of opinion that no éloge on the great Duke was in better taste than Lord John Russell’s; but, perhaps, the one that will best stand the test of time was that of Alfred Tennyson:—